


Long Shadows Follow

by kay_cricketed



Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: M/M, Role Reversal, Spoilers, what is this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-24
Updated: 2012-11-24
Packaged: 2017-11-19 09:11:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/571631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kay_cricketed/pseuds/kay_cricketed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a parallel universe, it's Pitch who can't remember his past or purpose as the newly appointed Guardian.  Meanwhile, the cruel and ancient Jack Frost comes to call with false promises.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Long Shadows Follow

**Author's Note:**

> This is a fill for the RotG kink meme (original prompt and fill found here: http://rotg-kink.dreamwidth.org/1511.html?thread=12263#cmt12263).

He runs from them.

He can’t bear to see the accusation in their eyes, the hardening of North’s craggy face before he turns away. It hadn’t been Pitch’s fault—a trick, nothing more, the disembodied laughter of Jack Frost chasing him to the cold dark of the woods. But of course, that’s no excuse. It _is_ Pitch’s fault. He should have known. He’s intelligent, in a way that’s always been his curse, and he should have known.

It makes perfect sense that a twisted, angry spirit like Pitch Black should fall for one of Jack Frost’s mean-minded traps. It’s a kind of sense that Pitch hates to believe in, though. He wants to be _good_. Better. Believed in.

(No one believes in the Boogeyman. They never have. He is a figure in storybooks, an admonishment to naughty children, and something to revile. Him, a Guardian? Perhaps—yes, perhaps it had always been a pipe dream or a cruel joke.)

He runs and he runs far away from the warren and he runs to the darkest shrouded room in his tunnel of nightmares, underneath the most broken bed frame, where none of the staircases know their way up or down. The realm keens and warps before his acute misery, trying vainly to wrap around its master, and Pitch would let it, if it were possible. He holds himself by the arms and gasps, heaving for some stability in a world gone suddenly mad. Pitch’s entire existence is based on fear: the fear he cultivates for the children, the fear he lives with of his own lack of memory and purpose, but most of all, it’s that fear which burrows beneath his skin and into his marrow that sings of _and you will never know why_.

_The Man in the Moon chose you,_ they’d said.

_We don’t know why, but he seems to believe you’re necessary, that there’s something inside of you, a core that makes you a Guardian,_ they’d said.

_Oh Pitch,_ they’d said. _No. No, what have you done?_

Oh, but he’s _tried_ , can’t they see that? Can’t they see—

“Wow, and I thought Michigan had its depressing moments,” says a voice from the darkest well of black in the room. 

Pitch sucks in a sharp breath, gathering his shadows around him as a coat. He straightens and steps back from that corner, from the voice of Jack Frost, ancient and forever trapped in the thin strappings of a child. “Jack,” he says.

A glitter of pale, translucent moonlight slides across the room from his origin point, and inch by inch, Pitch’s world is covered in delicate tendrils of frost. Jack laughs at him, emerging from the gloom as if he’s been a part of it, but that can’t be—not Jack, shining and luminescent, his fingers white as milk and his lips as blue as death itself come to kiss. He grins at Pitch with all his teeth, and he is ice but oh, he is everything Pitch yearns for: the light, the mischief, the cold that can feel nothing.

At least, these are the things Pitch had imagined he’d wanted. But oblivion, for a while, had lost to a foolish hope he could be more.

“Don’t look so betrayed,” Jack says softly, fingers tightening around his staff. He leans against it, leans closer to Pitch as though he might lose his balance and fall into him. “I only showed you the truth. What they really think of you, to throw you away so easily? Pitch. Pitch, look at me.”

Pitch can’t _stop_ looking.

“You have to know,” says Jack. “Hey, look at me.” He presses his hand to his chest. “You can see it, right?”

“See what?” Pitch asks, broken.

Jack laughs in disbelief, tipping his staff to the floor and using it to jump, to catch one of the stairwells and perch there like some bird. “That you and I, we’re the _same_!”

(Oh, is this his ruptured heart? Is this skipped beat some wanting or some horror? He can’t tell, not anymore.)

“Don’t,” says Pitch.

“No, no, no, no,” Jack urges. “Hear me _out_. I know what it’s like, Pitch. The big guys don’t think you can do it because they fear you and what you can do. They don’t know what it’s like, being isolated, _alone_ with the rest of the world believing nothing of your existence—not understanding _why_.”

Pitch looks at him.

Jack steps down to the stone again, his toes cracking the ice formed beneath them. He steps closer to Pitch, his hand held out as if in supplication, his face painfully earnest. “They can’t understand what it is to be _feared_ by the very children we were created for. To be put into some, some pathetic song as a warning against our touch, our punishments. To not even know why we have been created at all.”

Pitch clutches his shadows around him. There is no handhold, though, that can stop him from falling. “But you,” he strangles, “but you know—”

“My purpose?” Jack laughs and tips his shoulder, shrugging. “Sure. I used to be a big cheese, you know. The pagans loved winter just as much as summer, and whatever name they gave me, they knew I would bring them beauty. But I got lost, Pitch. I wasn’t as kind as the fab four up there,” he nods upward, “and I got cast aside. You know how that feels.”

Yes, he does. He closes his eyes and tries to regain something of the center he knows he’s never had, not really. There is nothing but emptiness in him: a vast chasm of his namesake.

A hand on his cheek, frigid and stiff, startles him from staring into that chasm.

When he opens his eyes, Jack smiles up at him, standing on his tiptoes. He is older, so much older than Pitch, but he appears the boy all the same. And for this moment, he is as warm as he is cold, as tender as he is merciless. His palm pressed to Pitch’s cheek leaves a kiss of frost in its wake.

“Come with me, Pitch,” says Jack. He takes his hand away and shows it to Pitch: a spider web of black nightmare crackling out deep into his lifeline. “See the beautiful things we can create together? See our _power_?”

Pitch trembles, just for that instant.

Yes, he can see it—the way Jack will put light back into his ugly world and give him a purpose, even if it’s a false one. They will destroy every last belief in good together and terrorize the children for forgetting them so easily, and in this ugly revolution, Jack will draw him closer and closer with promises of love, acceptance, and compassion. He will give Pitch the things that mean nothing to him. In time, Pitch will believe in _Jack_ and little else, but by then the world will be frightened and cower before him, the children, the emptiness not quenched but made into something so tremendous that Pitch cannot see past it—

“No,” he whispers. It takes all of his will power.

“The world will know your name, Pitch, they will believe in you!”

“They’ll _fear_ me,” Pitch shouts, knocking the outstretched hand away. The first step back is the hardest, but the next is easy, and the following three easier still. With distance, Jack’s spell is less exhaustive. “Maybe that’s how it’s supposed to be, but there has to be a balance, Jack! There has to be a relief from the fear or they’ll never learn from it!”

(Something deep tugs at Pitch—something lost, something elusive—)

Jack’s face darkens. He snarls and gathers his staff close to his chest. “So much for the big, bad Boogeyman,” he says. “Time to go back under the bed!”

The blast of frost hits Pitch directly in the chest. He feels himself flying, grasping desperately for the wind, and his back hits metal with a clang. The cage—the spirit put him in one of his hanging cages!

The door swings shut, and Jack laughs at him, peering in through the beautiful iron work. “Pitch, it’s too bad it didn’t work out between us. But I’ll be sure to tell the others hi for you, huh?”

He blows a kiss that _bites_ Pitch’s nose and cheeks. Pitch shudders and rubs his face, trying to warm it.

When he looks up again, the burn is fading and Jack is gone. He is alone.

Curling up against the cage, Pitch tries to blanket himself in his shadows, drawing them over his head like a child in bed. From some lost fold, something heavy falls into his lap. Something shining and golden and oblong.

Pitch stares at the tube of first teeth in incomprehension. He touches the soft enamel pattern on its roof. He hears, from inside, a weeping that he knows from a very long, long time ago.

(There is nowhere left to run. He may as well open it.)


End file.
